Probably the largest PK laboratory in the world was the PEAR lab at Princeton University. Begun as a special project in 1979 by the former dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, Robert Jahn, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) lab had grown to include several substantial psychic research programs. The Lab closed in February of 2007.

"For 28 years, we've done what we wanted to do, and there's no reason to stay and generate more of the same data," said the ESP lab's founder, Jahn, former dean of Princeton's engineering school and an emeritus professor. "If people don't believe us after all the results we've produced, then they never will."

Random Mechanical Cascade

The PEAR lab had a distinctive approach to research, characterized by their insistence that really large databases are necessary to draw meaningful conclusions. In keeping with this scientific philosophy, the PEAR team had spent years accumulating large numbers of trials on only a few PK tasks conducted according to strict scientific protocols. Because the work originated from an engineering school, engineering concerns were emphasized. Considerable attention was paid to the devices to be targeted for psychokinetic effort.

When the cascade device was in use, subjects tried mentally to "push" more of the balls to land in the right hand bins on some trials, in the left-hand bins on others, and for baseline trials to let the balls fall naturally. Electronic sensors connected to microprocessors counted the balls as they entered the bins, and counts were displayed below the bins.

The PEAR team had concentrated its PK work on several devices. One was a true (that is, quantum mechanical) random-event generator that produced a random chain of positive and negative pulses. Another earlier device was the random mechanical cascade. Pictured at right, an operator tries to influence a stream of water to move a certain direction.

All of the PK experiments with these devices followed the "tripolar" protocol. Each subject tried for a PK effect in one direction (for example, low numbers on the display) on certain runs, and the opposite direction (high numbers) on other runs, as well as doing "baseline" runs where the subject rests and tries to have no effect at all. This three-part protocol was to guard against any possible bias in the physical system that might fool researchers into believing the bias in the system is a genuine PK effect. Experiments were set up so that all the data from the formal testing were automatically stored in computer files; thus the PEAR researchers had an unbroken performance record of every subject that takes part in the experiments.

Right, Subject attempts to influence stream of water in PEAR lab experiment.

Data collection on these PK projects was an ongoing process, so publications from PEAR researchers tended to be in the nature of progress reports, but some PK effects did seem to be emerging from the data.

Elaborate analytical methods had been developed to extract as much understanding from these results as possible, and to guarantee their integrity against any experimental or data processing flaws.